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Your access to thought leaders’ time is a crucial factor in defining the impact of your thought leadership program. An excellent thought leadership program pairs access to thought leaders with a palette of initiatives with known efforts and outcomes.

What is new: Focus your thought leaders’ time on content initiatives where results match efforts.  

Why it matters: Thought leaders who start seeing a clear impact of their work will likely invest more of their time into your thought leadership program. Without them, you face the risk of becoming stranded.

Effort vs. Impact: To maximize the impact of highly demanded resources, you can match it with the value different initiatives deliver and their success metrics. A matrix with required efforts and expected impact is a good starting point for finding the sweet spot of initiatives that excite thought leaders about contributing to the program.

🎯 High impact—low effort: The most important category to nail upfront is where you can create high impact can be created with low effort. Present these six options to your thought leaders and ask what they are most comfortable in creating value:

• Slides for customer conversations/presentations in closed settings
• Turning customer questions into industry insights
• Talk tracks as a base for a variety of content assets
• Speak on established podcasts with known audiences and reach.
• Earned/paid media interviews with high-profile trade or business media
• Earned/owned blog posts on topics with high news value.
• Industry fact-sharing in social media channels

🔦 Initiatives with low efforts and high impact are terrific to start with. They enable your program to deliver from the start and excite thought leaders to contribute further.

🔑 A great thought leader 👑 will likely consider all seven options, but if you get pushback on three or more, your candidate might not be the right one.

💰 High impact—high effort: This category has high visibility and requires significant time commitments from your thought leaders. Three sub-categories are worth considering:

• Original research reports
• Visual storytelling productions
• Own event productions

For success in this category, companies must commit to sizeable development budgets and up-front marketing dollars to build brand and audience.

🥇 Insights for these initiatives must be high quality before packaging your insights into powerful productions.  

🔑 The brand-building aspect is about making your sub-brand known before you can recruit/acquire readers, watchers, and event participants.

🗓 This is a long game that requires multi-year commitments to pay off. Three years is a short initiative, and after five to seven years, you should be able to reap the full benefits.

❓ Low impact—low effort: This third category is often action-driven and occurs in areas without a clear strategy or research agenda to build from. The desire for something quick can come at the price of coming across as dirty.

• Own/earned blog posts with low news value
• Owned/paid webinars without any new research input
• Face-to-face presentations with aggregated slides from various presentations
• Standard customer presentation kits without customizations for your audience
• One-off appearances without any adjacent assets and activation plans

⏳Limit your efforts in this category. It is a distraction to your primary focus, and many small initiatives in this category can turn into a river of sunk resources and missed opportunities.

🛑🚔 Low impact—high effort: This category can consume a significant share of your resources and is worth questioning:

• Custom speeches you design from scratch for each speaking engagement.
• Content creation based on vague storylines. If you cannot write an excellent one-page executive summary, save your agency dollars for later.
• Stories building on no, questionable, or old data have limited potential to inspire customers to take action.
• Stories that build from solution concepts and messages without crisp definitions of the customer challenges/opportunities you address.

Consider reducing initiatives in this category. Every initiative in this category represents a drag on your organization and is an opportunity to move focus to the top two categories.

Bottom line: Here is a suggestion on how to apply these ideas today:

1. Start by mapping out the content types in your current blueprint across the four categories.
2. Engage with your most vital thought leaders in an effort vs impact analysis.
3. Select a subset that delivers the expected impact and keeps your thought leaders happy.

This approach will create a solid execution plan for year one as a base for raising your game next year.

Additional reading suggestions

• Qualities of a thought leader [BLOGPOST] – by Tara Coomans, Avaans
• 8 Key thought leaders: Who they are and why they matter [BLOGPOST] – by Robert F. Smith
• Mastering the art of influence: Key types of thought leadership content [BLOGPOST] – by Netscribes
• The content marketer’s guide to thought leadership [BLOGPOST] – by Rebecca Riserbato, Hubspot